"After the incredible success of the Asus Eee PC, other manufacturers are ready to get their piece of the pie. This means that within the next few months we are going to see this segment go from just two devices - the Eee PC and the Nanobook (which has yet to come out in the U.S. but which we have been hearing about for some time) - to many more." Another article on the Eee says: "Five of the 10 best-selling notebooks, including the top three models this weekend do not run Windows or Mac OS X. In fact, they are different models of the same diminutive notebook the Asus Eee PC - that runs on Linux."

Everyone's being praising the Eee PC from the moment it was announced. That competition has arrived, comes as no surprise. Any product that can double in price from what was announced and still sell faster than anyone can make them has to be a good idea.

This sector really benefits from Open Source. At this price level, the Microsoft tax really bites. Plus, being able to put on a full office suite, photo editor, etc., for free, turns what could have been novelty products into genuinely useful tools.

Everyone's being praising the Eee PC from the moment it was announced. That competition has arrived, comes as no surprise. Any product that can double in price from what was announced and still sell faster than anyone can make them has to be a good idea. This sector really benefits from Open Source. At this price level, the Microsoft tax really bites. Plus, being able to put on a full office suite, photo editor, etc., for free, turns what could have been novelty products into genuinely useful tools. Exciting stuff.

The really exciting thing is that the EeePC and its soon-to-be-released competitors will, no doubt, finally bring Linux into the public's view. One of the competitors at least will offer a full GNOME, XFCE or KDE desktop with access to full repositories by default ... possibly via Xubuntu or Zenwalk or a similar distribution.

The Microsoft crowd will spin "but it can't run Windows applications" ... and the public will see "but it can run thousands of applications all for free ...".

I agree - the quoted sentiment doesn't seem to affect Apple laptop sales - yeah, they _can_ run Windows (so can EEE) but, how many actually do?! My experience says not very many at all. My testers like their Macs but use Bootcamp to run XP/Vista for application testing but most casual Apple users I know don't seem to bother... or be that bothered.